I was going through this thread thinking how little I could find to 'sneer' at. In the end, if you like it, you like it.
I've got what I think is a pretty broad range of taste in 'popular music' (jazz, classical and other things too, but let's leave them for now).
I can listen to any amount of shiney disposable pop. I love the joie de vivre of 70s disco-soul like Earth, Wind and Fire. I can drown in the vocal style and the sheer unapologetic romanticism of people like Glenn Campbell. I can go for the anger and teenage kicks of punk. I like the seedy glamour of the new romantics like Soft Cell. Hip-hop has beats, rhymes - and a reality to it that moves me in much the same way that the best folk music does. I love the songwriting and wry wit of Brit-pop, old and new (from The Kinks through XTC to Blur and Super Furry Animals). I can apreciate the musicianship in speed metal as much as the intricacies of flamenco (and as Rodrigo and Gabriela have shown, they aren't that far apart). I like the commitment to minimalism and space that characterises things from Krautrock to trip-hop. I love individuality and experimentalism of oddballs like Bjork, Sufjan Stevens and Owen Pallett. Even Travis and Coldplay at their best do melody well, and I can go for melody. And so on. I don't apologise for any of it, whatever anyone else thinks, however much anyone sneers.
However, there are just a few things I just can't listen to:
1. sheer middle-of-the-road crapness that hints at the worst kind of Andrew-Lloyd Webbery musical, e.g. Meatloaf. There are people who have managed to combine 'musical' vocal style with some grandeur and pop sensibility - look at Arthur Lee of Love, who married Johnny Mathis to psychedelia, but Meatloaf in comparison just seems a lumbering musical halfwit;
2. Twiddly stuff with screeching vocalists singing laughably pretentious lyrics (e.g. Rush). Sorry, but I just can't go there. It's like someone reading from an interminable sub-Tolkein fantasy trilogy while scraping their nails down a blackboard.
It's not that I sneer at people who like these things, but I don't understand how the people who listen to them can do it. That's all.